Data rock

I need to remember to publish some links in my next post. To my regular readers, thank you for your patience. I had been publishing links in earlier posts, but had gotten away from that due to RL (real life). Sheesh!

So anyway, what's with today's title... pretty odd, even for me!

Well, to paraphrase "Weird" Al Yankovic, "It's All About the Data". I was looking at a spreadsheet with some of my blog data ([*sigh] yes, I keep my blog data in a spreadsheet- I suppose Google has an app or service available, but I don't need a) that much granularity and b) to pay buckazoids for that). Well, maybe when I'm bigger than J.K. Rowling, J.R.R. Tolkien and a third well-known writer, then maybe I'll pay for the analytics. Not now, John.

You were warned- this is an odd blog post- much stream-of-consciousness going on... such Doge. Every so often, I'll throw an easter egg in just for my own amusement. For those unaware, easter egg is intentionally not capitalized as it's a tech term and has no connection to any religious observances. So, here's a hint- there's a quote from a song in the preceding text. Name that tune in the comments section, and you be immortalized in a soon to be published blog! Publication of your name also gets your name featured in a label, so if you've got a website... name that tune!! :)

Back to the spreadsheet. I've mentioned that I've been really busy at work this past summer. So busy, in fact, that I had zero blog postings in June. This makes me a little sad, but then again, I've not published anything on my Wordpress account in a long time (May 31st, to be precise). I was updating my spreadsheet, and had to use some extrapolated data for four months. As I was doing this, I kept on looking at one column, and the more I looked at the column, the less sense it made to me. In fact, for this column to be accurate, it would absolutely require the sort of granularity that Google's analytics- or just plain raw data- could provide. So, I did what any data person would do in that situation: I deleted it.

Tonight promises to be a quiet night. As I write this, it's 1800 local (-5 GMT). There's a Chicago Bears football game on @1930, but chances are I won't watch it. I'm not a huge sports fan by any stretch of the definition, but I do try and catch the Bears' games. However, if they're not playing at noon, the chances of me watching the game drop drastically. Like down to nearly zero.

So, the plan is this: finish tweaking the positions on the Music_Recordings form, and get back to entering data. Of course, as the Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth von Moltke once famously quipped, "No operation extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main body of the enemy". Or, as more commonly misquoted, no plan of battle survives first contact with the enemy. In my case, boredom would be the enemy. "Hah"! you might say- this guy writes about the care and feeding of databases, and then says boredom might stall the project?

*Microsoft Access strikes again. My form is GONE. All I did was open the database, and my form is GONE.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.